Saturday, September 11, 2010

chickens are a luxury... but not in africa

A while ago I spent a few months in rural Zambia and Zimbabwe; and it was an interesting trip. Most of the people I met were subsistence farmers who competed with the hippos for river bottom land, and who would go to great lengths to get protein in any form. Fish, bush meat, domestic animals -- all were a prized addition to their diet. In the villages, there would often be a flock of chickens around the house, and to my American eye, they looked pretty scrawny.

When you visit a village like this they're at pains to be hospitable, and most every night there was a chicken dinner and many questions about America. The chicken was often the best that they had, and they'd trot it out with the sadza (a mush made of ground corn) and a bit of this or that, and I ended up giving away most of my clothes. Western T-shirts were prized there, as were American $1 bills -- $1 USD being roughly 2 days wages for a 12 hour a day laborer. I appreciated their earnest, heartfelt hospitality. It was really amazing.

The chickens were always owned by someone, and what they represented was a net benefit to the family that owned it. The egg laying was paltry by American standards -- an egg a week, for instance -- but whatever eggs the chickens produced they did so on food that was inedible by the villagers, and the chicken meat was also made from foraged foods inedible to humans.

Contrast that to our treatment of poultry; we measure our hens efficiency in pounds of feed per dozen eggs; a good hen will produce 280 eggs a year, and we've got it down to a science.

My feeding wilted produce to my pigs is my way of making the pork less of a luxury; using food that would otherwise be wasted and making something good out of it. My African pigs.